Search Results

This chapter discusses the influence of Eliade’s Romanian Orthodox theological background on his understanding of religion. It particularly considers Eliade’s early (pre-India) writings, the possible influence of Nae Ionescu and Eliade’s Bucharest friends, and some previously published work on the subject. After establishing a series of consonances or homologies between background and understanding—such as icons as hierophanies—it considers to what extent the former might have determined the latter. Recognizing certain divergences, the conclusion is that Orthodox theology has not exerted a dominating influence upon Eliade in the sense of imposing dogmatic assumptions about the real/sacred upon him. Its ritualistic influence, nonetheless, enabled an understanding of religion that would not have been forthcoming given a different cultural background.

The anonymous record of a journey from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and back again in 333-34 understandably holds an important position in the history of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land as the first of a genre of late antique “pilgrim” texts. The Bordeaux Itinerary comprises two parts of markedly different character: a list of changes (mutationes) and stopovers (mansiones) covering the journey to Jerusalem and back again, and a more discursive section describing sites of Old and New Testament relevance in the Holy Land section. Although the text has long been considered as rather unsophisticated, recent reevaluations have sought to see in the anonymous compiler the creator of an artful narrative structure and/or the promoter of a sophisticated theological agenda. Based on a close attention to the structure of the text itself, this chapter argues that, rather than Jerusalem, Constantinople, the new seat of the imperial court, was the primary destination of the anonymous traveler; it puts this suggestion in the context of other contemporary travelers and petitioners. This observation suggests that more prosaic motives than Christian piety were the stimulus for the initial trip from Bordeaux and that the anonymous traveler was in fact an opportunistic pilgrim.

This chapter traces how Saint Bonaventure received and transformed some Neoplatonic motifs in writing his Itinerary of the Mind to God. It compares Plotinus' conception of the ascent to the One with Bonaventure's description of approaching God through speculation. This chapter suggests that though Bonaventure never studied any work of Plotinus or Plato, he was obviously inspired not only by the Scripture but also by the books that transmitted a Neoplatonic, Stoic, and Aristotelian heritage to him.

In Direcció Lisboa, Josep Pla effects a redistribution of Iberian cultural space. The Civil War had forced him to accept the utopian character of the Iberian federation, and the demise of this political ideal strengthened the certainty of irreducible otherness. It was no longer against the foil of Catalan modernity, but against the sensual and sensible Portuguese way of life that Castile appeared in the light of its barbaric disruption of the Peninsula's diversity. Pla framed his travels to Portugal with the trope of the itinerary. The approximations and separations in space do double duty for the conjunctions and disjunctions in time, collecting the variegated themes and descriptions of the Other into the discourse of “travel narrative” but also subjecting them to the interpretive conventions of historical discourse. If Pla indulges in a detailed representation of Portuguese difference, in turn Portugal allows him to de-familiarize Spain in an Iberian representation that competes with official history through the objectivity of presence.